Sleep has not been my friend since my arrival. Normally I’m a night person, but now I’m an
extreme morning person. Most nights I
wake up around 2 AM, and am just kind of done sleeping. The time change is a factor, I don’t ever
sleep well in new beds, which is also a factor, and occasionally there is a
radical sleep interruption as well.
Day begins in unique fashion at 12:45 AM. There is a loud buzzing sound that startles
me from my sleep. Power outages are
common here, as in daily, so I assume it’s just something resetting itself, and
just lay back down. It buzzes
again. No worries, sometimes it takes
two tries for a machine to successfully reboot.
A third time! It’s feasible the
power just keeps going back out. A fourth time! Honestly, not good reasoning
here, I just don’t want to get up, and I’m hoping it goes away on its own. Fifth and sixth time in rapid
succession. I start paying attention to
other things.
I hear loud noises in the hallway, several voices; quite
unusual here. They aren’t Americans, and
aren’t loud all the time. They also have
a seven day workweek and don’t make a habit of being out and about late. The streets are pretty quiet by about ten. I assume I need to answer the door and slowly
start to get dressed. A seventh and
eighth buzz occurs, followed by a knock on the door. It turns out the buzzing is a doorbell that
the hotel staff uses to let residents know they hate them too much to knock.
When you answer the door at 12:45 AM after a night of
quietly enjoying dinner and not leaving the hotel, I’m not sure what you’d
expect to find on the other side, but it was exactly as I expecting: three cops
open carrying AK-47’s demanding to see my passport.
Yep. That’s how my
morning started, how was yours? Our
local guide was with the cops and let me know that this was “normal.” That was a surprise to my colleague down the
hall who had spent six months in India previously and had never needed to
randomly provide her passport at midnight.
I proceeded to go over to my roommate, who shall here forth be known as
Ears of Steel, to wake him up and let him know that he needed to get his
passport.
I probably should have been scared, but for whatever reason,
I just thought “no bigs, I’ll get them my passport.” As they inspected said passport, they also
held up a camera high in the air and snapped a picture of gorgeous two hours of
sleep Taylor. It was nice that they
lifted it up high so I could get the Facebook angles thing going, but it later
occurred to me that this was likely simply required for them to actually get my
face. They are after all, generally six
inches shorter than me.
After confirming that the passports were in order, they and
their lovely open carry AK’s, did need to come into the room and inspect my
roommates backpack for whatever scary things make it through customs but are
dangerous in a hotel room.
Obviously. A few moments later,
they left, and that was that. Strangely
enough, I had no issue going back to sleep within a few minutes. I would later learn that most of our group
got a similar experience, although not all of us. That’s right, I’m one of the scary ones.
My morning started again around 5:30 the way any rational
American would hope for after that experience: with the loud sound of
“AAAALLLLLLLAAAAAHHHHHHH” blaring through their window. Yep, that was my follow up to by
AK-vestigated at midnight. The loud
noise was followed up by about three minutes of prayer at a similar volume. Later in the day I noticed that the medians
throughout the city streets have large speakers that sit on a pole above
the. They have different songs or
speeches coming through on almost every city block. Who controls these and determines their
content, I’m unsure of, I do know that at least one of them likes to start his
day by praying to screaming at Allah though. I later learned that this is simply a traditional Muslim call to prayer, but being that Muslims may as well be pandas because of their rarity where I'm used to being, I had never experienced such a thing.
A breakfast buffet later followed. To follow up on yesterdays food blogging,
their juices and omelets are also better than ours, and my feelings that
chicken could in fact replace all other meat was reaffirmed by chicken
sausage. They don’t bother with the cute
American crap in their omelets either, they are always called “cheese omelets”
because they are just eggs with a butt ton of cheese in them. Delightful.
Unfortunately though, there was a bowl labeled “fresh fruit” that had
stuff in it that tasted like tomatoes.
Kind of a jerk move India, I guess the food isn’t perfect.
Given the events of the night before, it was determined that
the planned activities for the day of visiting the REDACTED would not be a good
idea. Instead we visited another inner
city church. Our bus decided to just
power on down an alleyway to get us there, proceeding to convince one man to help
us out by lifting a tent pole that was essentially the roof of his house out of
the way for us. Personally, I would have
preferred to just walk an extra 200 feet, but my opinion wasn’t asked. It was good for about five minutes of looking
out the window and watching what felt like half the city laugh at us. White people right? Darn Brits.
Church was a similar experience as the past two days. I’m still not super comfortable with the
gifts or the attention but am happy to help make their day, even if it is just
by being the hairiest ghost they’ve ever seen.
But remember how I wrote about how guilty I felt when they all wanted
pictures with me the first day? Well
that was back, and after the selfies, one girl wanted my autograph. That’s right, I was literally viewed as a
celebrity for being American. That broke
my heart. I almost cried right there
while chicken scratching “Taylor Brandel” on a slip of notebook paper for
someone who’s name I didn’t, nor likely ever will, know.
It’s heartbreaking to know that the situations these people
are in are so sad that simply seeing big white guys handing Dum-Dums to kids
inspires hope. If you need someone to
finish your leftovers, find dark humor in a situation, or represent you in some
crazy trial-by-boggle justice system, I’m your guy. Inspire hope?
I hope you’re collecting more autographs to be safe.
After church, we found a different way back to the bus,
which I assume must have been airlifted out of the alley I last saw it in. Or we just boarded a new bus and the old one
was just turned into low income housing.
I took an enlightening ride in a car with a local back to the bus from
the church. He drove like a madman. Well, like rainman, it was brilliant. He bulleted down that alley at like 30 MPH,
on a dirt road, just swerving around bikes, pedestrians, mortal cars, and
riskshaws like it weren’t no thang at all.
That was entertaining but the enlightening part came when he
pointed at the car ahead. The rear
window had a campaign sign in it, along with several cars in a convoy in front
of it. He pointed to the cars and said
“those are politicians. Crooks.” Ah, corrupt politicians, the universal
language. Or so my colleagues and I
thought, and said as much until he followed with this golden nugget of info:
“that large face in the middle there, he just murdered someone last month.” So that’s a thing.
The rest of the day was just more travel. Three hours to go 40 km back to Delhi,
boarding a train (my first train ride ever!), and buckling in for a 12 hour
ride to the next city. The train is a
unique experience, like everything else here.
There are more people than seem reasonable to me but somehow it
works. Leaving Delhi was as exhausting
as the bus ride. There is no stopping,
and instead of slowly taking in the whole town, you just look at the window as
you see literally miles and miles of slums pass by your eyes with no
breaks. It’s the saddest I’ve felt on
what has thus far been a trip severely lacking in joy.
As I type this, I have just returned from my first trip to
the squatty potty, which in case you’ve never experienced it, is a hole in the
train you squat over and poop through. As
in it just drops to the train tracks below.
Note to self, do not play on the train tracks. Also, I made the mistake of going to the
“bathroom” without my shoes on, so now I have to take my socks off to avoid
playing the game of “whose urine is in my sock right now.” I joke because it’s how I deal with
sadness. Urine on my sock is gross, but
that’s not even really dirty compared to the living situation I’ve seen
literally millions of people in over the past 72 hours. Don’t worry about the pee on my sock, pray
for the people of India, that’s what I’m going to do.
Other Day 4 observations:
- The pizza came with a ketchup packet. I truly don’t know how to respond to this.
- I saw a goat on the roof of a house. Twice.
- My friend Mitch truly has a gift for spotting people peeing on the street. His count is at 32. I’m just at 2. I’m okay losing the contest.
- 40% of this city is just high rise apartments that never finished construction. Seriously, I’ve seen like 100 of them.
- I’ve seen enough limping dogs to last a lifetime in 48 hours. My puppies are getting the biggest hugs of their lives when I get home.
- Once you leave Delhi, the clouds are actually white again, and the sky is actually blue.
- All Hindu gods that are Elephantic look the same to me.
- I think I was accidentally racist today, but it’s the hardest I’ve ever seen our pastor laugh, so I’m okay with it.
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